“The dwellers can tell us,” Running Fox said, “once we can talk with them “
“The dwellers can do much more than that,” Red Wolf answered slowly. Exultance leaped. “We have nothing to dread, I believe. Nothing! The spirits have brought us to a better home than we dreamed of.”
His men gaped. He did not explain at once. Entering the settlement again, he said thoughtfully, “Yes, we must learn their tongue, we must teach them … what we want them to know.” His glance went ahead, to Aryuk’s family. They stood bunched, waiting for whatever would happen. Hands gripped hands, arms lay around children. “We will begin on both these things by taking one of them along to our camp.” He smiled at the girl. Terror stared back.
1965 A.D.
On this gentle April afternoon, across the Bay in San Francisco, Wanda Tamberly was being born. Time Patrol agent or no, she must stave off a certain eeriness. Happy birthday, me.
Coincidence. Ralph Corwin had requested she visit him then because it was the earliest afternoon on which his Berkeley house would not be a-bustle. As undermanned as it was, the outfit could spare but a handful of people to trace the migrations of man into the New World, no matter how important to the future those might be. Overwhelmed by the task, they were always coming and going at his administrative base.
Like many other special offices, this was a residential building, rented for several years by persons who did actually live there. Twentieth-century America was a logical locale. Most of the workers were native to it, blending easily in. They could not well use regional headquarters in San Francisco; too much activity would make it undesirably noticeable. Berkeley in the ’60s came near being ideal. Nobody paid particular attention to an occasional oddity when everybody was being nonconformist. Eventually hysteria about drug abuse would make official surveillance too likely. However, by then the Patrol’s group would have finished their job and quit the house.
Granted, it lacked a hidden space for timecycles to appear in. Tamberly took public transportation, got off on Telegraph Avenue, strolled north on it and across the campus. The day was gorgeous and she felt curious about the decade. It had been a legend of sorts while she was growing up.
Disappointment. Scruffiness, pretentiousness, self-righteousness. When a boy in dirt-stiffened jeans and what he probably imagined was an Indian blanket thrust a leaflet of pomposities about peace at her, she remembered ahead—Cambodia, boat people—and told him, with a sweet smile, “Sorry, I’m a fascist warmonger.” Well, Manse had once reminisced about the Youth Revolution to her, in terms that she should have taken for a warning. Why care now, when cherry trees stood like sunlit snowstorms?
The address she sought was a few blocks west of the university on Grove Street (which would be solemnly renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and referred to by her generation as Milky Way). The house was modest, well maintained. A satisfied landlord would not get inquisitive. She mounted its porch and rang the bell.
The door opened. “Miss Tamberly?” After she nodded: “How do you do. Please come in.” She saw a man tall, slender, with a Roman profile and toothbrush mustache beneath sleek gray-shot hair. His tan shirt had shoulder straps and several pockets, his tan slacks were razor-creased, his feet bore Birkenstock sandals. He looked about forty, but lifeline age meant little if you had received the Patrol’s longevity treatment.
He closed the door behind her and gave a firm handshake. “I am Corwin.” He smiled. “Pardon the ‘Miss.’ I couldn’t safely call you Agent Tamberly’ when you might have been a solicitor for a worthy cause. Or do you prefer ‘Ms’?”
“Whatever,” she replied, carefully casual. “Manse Everard’s explained to me how honorifics mutate.” Let him know I’m on friendship terms with an Unattached. In case he likes playing dominance games. “Most recently—I suppose ‘recently’ is right, when I left Beringia less than a week ago, personal timespan—I was Khara-tsetuntyn-bayuk, She Who Knows Strangeness.” Show the big anthropologist that a humble naturalist is not a complete naif in his field.
She wondered if it was the British accent that put her off. Inquiring at HQ, she’d learned he was born in Detroit, 1895. He had, though, done good work on American Indians during the ’20s and ’30s, before he joined the Patrol.
“Indeed?” His smile broadened. Actually kind of charming, she admitted. “Brace yourself. I shall want every last drop of your information about that country. But first let’s make you comfortable. What would you like in the way of refreshment? Coffee, tea, beer, wine, something a bit more authoritative?”
“Coffee, thanks. It’s early yet.” He guided her to the living room and an armchair. Furniture was well-worn. Full bookshelves lined the walls, holding mainly reference works. He excused himself, went kitchenward, soon came back bearing a tray of ware and morsels which she discovered were delicious. Having set things on a low table in front of her, he took a seat opposite and asked whether she minded if he smoked. That was quite considerate of a person from his birthtime; and he lit a cigarette, not a pipe like Manse.
“Are we alone here?” she wondered.
“For the nonce. I went to some trouble about that.” Corwin laughed. “Have no fears. I simply thought we should get acquainted without distractions. I can better appreciate what I’m told when I know a bit about the teller. What’s a nice girl like you doing in an organization like this?”
“Why, you know,” she answered, surprised. “Zoology, ecology—what I think they called natural history when you were young.”
Hey, that was tactless. To her relief, he showed no offense. “Yes, of course I’ve been informed.” Soothingly: “You’re a pure scientist, for the sake of the knowledge. I confess to a touch of envy.”
She shook her head. “No, not really, or I wouldn’t be in the Patrol. The pure scientists belong to civilian institutions uptime, don’t they? My job, well, it’s just that we, the Patrol, can’t: understand what goes on among people, especially people close to nature, unless we have some knowledge of their environments. That’s why I was doing my Jane Goodall when and where I was, instead of elsewhere or earlier. The arrival of the Paleo-Indians was expected sometime about then. Not that I’d necessarily meet them personally—that just happened—but I’d’ve reported on the conditions they’d find, the resources available to them, and so on.”
Concurrently, with dismay: What a motormouth I’m being. He knows all this by heart. Nervousness. Pull yourself together, nit.
Corwin had blinked. “I beg your pardon? Doing your, er, Jane Goodall?”
Tamberly relaxed a little. “Sorry, I forgot. She isn’t famous yet. A breakthrough ethologist out in the wilds.”
“Role model for you, eh? And a jolly good one, to judge by the result.” He sipped from his cup. “I misspoke myself. Obviously I’ve been aware of your role, why you were where-when you were. What I’d like to know is more basic, why you enlisted, how you first learned about us.”
To speak of that to an interested, interesting, handsome man quickly became more than pleasant—a release. How it hurt, up in 1987 and afterward, that she must lie to her parents, sister, old friends about her reasons for not going on to grad school and about the work that took her away from them. More than once, training at the Patrol Academy, she’d needed a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. She was past that now. Or was she entirely?
“Well, it’s a long story, too long for details, I think. My uncle was already a Patrolman, unbeknownst to me or his other kin, when I was studying evolutionary biology at Stanford. He was, is, uh—oh, damn, shouldn’t we speak Temporal? English ties itself in knots, trying to handle time travel.”